Random musing about words and spam

[Eric Murray]

On Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 09:02:30PM -0400, Steve Furlong wrote:
> On Tuesday 02 September 2003 19:00, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
> > Spammers recently adopted tactics of using randomly generated words,
> > eg. "wryqf", in both the subject and the body of the message.
> ...
> > Could the pseudowords be easily detected by their characteristics,
> ...
> > Presence of pseudowords then could be added as one of spam
> > characteristics.


Many of them space the code words away from the rest of
the subject text, i.e.

"Subject: what if it were true?                                       5258pf2"

I think this is to hide the code word since many mail readers
only show 40-60 characters of the Subject.

I've been id'ing spam by looking for excess whitespace
in the Subject line for a couple years (it's one of
about 200 checks my program makes).  I'm sure
other spam-recognition software does this as well.


Eric